Art Against Imperialism in ’80s Pakistan: A Photo Essay
Pakistani leftist artists were not only opposing Zia-ul-Haq’s military rule but also challenging similar US-backed dictatorships around the world.
In Pakistan, after the 1977 coup that launched General Zia-ul-Haq’s decade-long military dictatorship, visual and literary arts flourished as part of many progressive movements. Art that was created by leftists of various persuasions did important ideological work to sustain the Left through an exceptionally repressive period of Pakistani history.
In the context of an authoritarian regime, traditional repertoires of contentious politics become a dangerous strategy for resistance movements given the increased stakes of engaging in collective action. In such contexts, the visible work to be done is through arts and culture. As Mao Tse-Tung theorized, any struggle for liberation requires “the front of the pen and of the gun”. The ‘front of the pen’, which Mao also termed the ‘cultural front,’ serves the dual purpose of educating and uniting the people, and also levies a critique of political opponents.
“anti-Zia visual art was rooted in the South Asian artistic tradition while extending its commitment to anti-imperialist struggles across the Global South.”
This photo essay on anti-Zia visual art, will explore the intersection of art and left politics as the renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz envisioned it. Through an explicitly Marxist approach to politics and culture, Faiz contended that artists in South Asia could draw from and build on the deep Urdu poetic and artistic tradition while also aiding anti-imperialist movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While Left mobilization against the Zia dictatorship took several forms—for example, workers of the Pakistan People’s Party, the Women’s Action Forum, The Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, several trade unions, and others—one under-emphasized but significant node of Left opposition was led by artists and poets in the anti-authoritarian art movement. This movement straddled Faiz’s dialectic of the particular and universal in service of art. Thus, anti-Zia visual art was rooted in the South Asian artistic tradition while extending its commitment to anti-imperialist struggles across the Global South.
Here we present a selection of artistic work from the anti-authoritarian art movement against the Zia dictatorship.
We see that art as left politics does multiple things: it describes the political situation; raises awareness among viewers about the movement against the dictatorship; preserves the memory of a democratic Left; and fosters solidarity with the resistance movement. Keeping in mind Mao’s concept of art as a cultural front, we might read these images as both political education for the uninitiated and a critique of Zia and his supporters.
The Zia regime instituted stifling curbs on a wide range of artistic expression and media, including music, dance, visual and performance art. All figurative art was banned, except calligraphy and landscape painting. The Pakistan National Council of the Arts banned all figurative art except (religious) calligraphy and landscape painting. While the stated reasons for such censorship were rooted in religious dictates, there is no singular Islamic approach to art (historically or today), and therefore, this severe censorship appears to have been enacted primarily to quell the possibilities of dissent against the dictatorship.
New Year’s Bouquet — Ijaz ul Hassan
Lahori painter, Ijaz ul Hassan spent most of his career at National College of the Arts. During the Zia period, Hassan was jailed in the Lahore Fort for his involvement in Left politics. Much of his artwork provides both local and global commentary on imperialism in a similar vein to Faiz’s affinity with the global anti-imperialist struggle. In addition to his explicitly political themes, Hassan is known for his paintings of flowers, trees, and other foliage as political metaphor. For example, his painting entitled Let a Hundred Plants Grow is a reference to Mao’s famous slogan to promote the flourishing of the arts: ‘Let a hundred flowers blossom’. In the painting above entitled, New Year’s Bouquet, Hassan plays on this theme by using the vibrant colours he is known for, but, instead of flowers in the vase, there is only barbed wire. His flowers, he has stated, are an endorsement of existence, and so their absence in this image communicates the deep loss of humanity suffered as a result of the military dictatorship.
Thah! — Ijaz ul Hassan
The Zia dictatorship was just one of many dictatorships across the 1970s Global South that was propped up by US Imperialism. In other paintings from this time, Hassan expresses solidarity with the struggles of the Vietnamese against US Imperialism. In Thah! Hassan contrasts two depictions of femininity. Here on the left, we see a Vietnamese woman taking up arms as part of the Communist anti-imperialist struggle against the United States while on the right he depicts film star, Firdous, dancing; implying through this contrast that popular cultural products, such as Punjabi cinema have stunted the political education of the masses thereby preventing revolutionary action to take root in the Punjab.
Freedom — Ijaz ul Hassan
In Freedom, Hassan depicts a nude American hippie woman removing her bra and holding up a peace sign necklace in front of a starving Vietnamese child. This contrast, just as in the previous image, is meant to reveal the hypocrisy of American conceptualizations of freedom. American freedom, as Hassan depicts it, is one that sexualizes women, telling them that this objectification is, in fact, freedom, and purports to value peace as typified by hippie subculture, while US imperialist wars cause the starvation of Vietnamese children whose inability to be clothed is certainly no freedom.
Masawi Huqooq — Lalarukh
Feminist themes became critically important for Pakistani artists during the Zia period. The Zia dictatorship implemented draconian anti-women policies epitomized by the 1979 Hudood Ordinances, which limited women’s participation in society and most infamously, criminalized extra-marital sexual activity. These laws led to countless women’s imprisonment under accusations of so-called ‘honour’ crimes, including most grotesquely, the prosecution of rape victims for admitting to ‘extra-marital sex’.
Women protesting against Zia’s anti women laws during the 1983 Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD).
Though the Hudood Ordinances and other anti-women policies did not explicitly target artists, they effectively marginalized women from the arts by way of curbs on women’s mobility and freedom of expression in society at large. Female artists resisted, refusing to take up calligraphy or otherwise change their artistic style. Depictions of the female nude became an important political symbol for artists of all genders pushing back against censorship and persecution of women. The goals of feminist artists were articulated in the Manifesto of Women Artists, which was not made public until after the Zia period in order to protect the identities of the 15 signatories. Among the signatories were: Abbasi Abidi, Meher Afroze, Talat Ahmed, Veeda Ahmed, Shehrezade Alam, Riffat Alvi, Mamoona Bashir, Salima Hashmi, Birgees Iqbal, Zubeida Javed, Jalees Nagi, Qudsia Nisar, Nahid Raza, Lalarukh and Rabia Zuberi. They asserted the rights of women to be full participants in society which includes equal participation in politics, and in the arts, but also any activity that contributes to making the world a “happier more beautiful and more peaceful a place”.
Lalarukh, for example, was not only an important artist but also among the founders of the Women’s Action Forum, a feminist movement against Zia-ul-Haq. In Masawi Huqooq (above) or equal rights, one the posters Lalarukh created as part of her political work, she depicts women as veiled and chained by Zia’s misogynist legal codes. In Crimes Against Women (below), she assembles newspaper clippings of different reports of violence against women in Pakistan to illustrate the sheer number of such reports.
Crimes Against Women — Lalarukh
Carnival - Salima Hashmi
Salima Hashmi, also one of the founding members of Women’s Action Forum, made a series of paintings entitled, Carnival, as a reaction to Zia’s hanging of the Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1979 and a comment on the use of public executions for spectacle under Zia. Hashmi used cuttings of advertisements which included an image of a noose. The contrast between the title of the painting and its content evokes a chilling feeling of living in a context where state violence is transformed into entertainment for the masses.
In Sabra Dawn (below), Hashmi depicts the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut in a statement of solidarity. Just as Hassan’s work makes allusions to Vietnam as part of the anti-imperialist struggle, so too Hashmi links political developments in Pakistan with those elsewhere, offering solidarity to the Palestinian struggle against imperialism. This is a clear example of the art movement’s internationalist view — seeing Zia not in isolation, but as a symptom of the global force of US Imperialism. While in Pakistan, US imperialism was articulated through Zia, it took other forms across the Global South, from the Pinochet coup in Chile, the lack of aid to the FLN in the French-Algerian War, US aggression in Vietnam, and continuing atrocities in Palestine.
Sabra Dawn - Salima Hashmi
Painting by A.R. Nagori on the Sabra Shantila Massacre in Palestine
A.R. Nagori, hailing from Sindh, also depicted the Sabra Shantila Massacre in his work. In the painting above, he depicts an American soldier with devil horns stomping and scratching Palestine, causing the earth to bleed. Interestingly, this image was part of a series submitted to a 1982 exhibition held in Islamabad to choose paintings by Pakistani artists to accompany Zia on a diplomatic trip to the United States. Nagori’s series was not just rejected but banned. However, the submission itself was an orchestrated attempt by Nagori to reveal Zia’s hypocrisy in falling in line with US foreign policy interests even when it conflicted with the global pan-Islamic anti-colonial struggle. The painting is also, perhaps, an allusion to Zia’s direct role in the Black September massacre of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. When Zia, as Brigadier, was deployed to Jordan, he, according to the CIA, led the Pakistani training mission in battles to suppress anti-imperialist forces in the region (namely, the Iranian Marxist group, Fedayeen-e-Khalq, who were collaborating with the PLO).
In Nagori’s King of Clubs (below), which was also banned until Zia’s death in 1988, Nagori depicts Zia as the playing card ‘king of clubs’, commenting on the authoritarian violence perpetuated by the dictator.
King of Clubs — A. R. Nagori
Art by Baloch artist, Akram Dost Baloch
Akram Dost Baloch was a student at National College of Arts (Lahore) from 1978-83 where he came to see art as inherently linked to political struggles. His student work became a commentary on the Zia dictatorship’s brazen neglect and exploitation of Balochistan as it became a stronghold of the Mujahideen during the so-called Afghan Jihad sponsored by the US-Pakistan alliance through the 80s. For his outspoken critiques of Zia’s attack on Baloch identity, culture and society, he was repeatedly jailed during this period. On his return to Quetta, he founded the Arts department at the University of Balochistan. In his more recent work, such as this image, he depicts local textiles as a way to invoke Baloch identity.
It is worth noting that the relative obscurity of artists from Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the anti-Zia art movement also reflects the neglect and underrepresentation of these regions in mainstream cultural spheres despite their rich artistic traditions.
For the Left, art was inextricable from politics. Art and poetry (from poets such as Habib Jalib, Zahoor Hussein Zahoor, Qaswar Butt, and of course Faiz himself, to name just a few) was a key node of the Left’s resistance to repression under Zia. However, Pakistan’s artistic movements were rooted in more cosmopolitan concerns than just what was happening locally. Through the 1970s, the United States, as a global force for neo-imperialism installed and supported dictatorships across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Neo-imperialism in Pakistan was articulated locally through Zia but was a common symptom of neo-imperialism across the Global South. Pakistani artists understood this, and therefore, were not solely concerned with restoring democracy in Pakistan, but also saw themselves as contributing to an anti-imperialist struggle against the proliferation of dictatorship across the Global South.
Pakistani artists found affinity in anti-authoritarian struggles in Vietnam, Palestine, Chile and other places that were fighting Western imperialism and one of its all too common symptoms, dictatorship. However, they not only created art in solidarity with movements against imperialism and authoritarian rule across the Global South, but some also travelled to places like Palestine and Vietnam to join the armed struggle against imperialism. Mao wrote that all cultural work should ultimately serve the overthrow of imperialism and it can do that through criticizing, educating, and transforming the way people think, but should also be linked up to armed struggle against local imperialists and against the authoritarian states that imperialist dictatorships impose around the world. And that is how leftist artists across Pakistan responded to the Zia coup.
Challenging the structures of capitalist imperialism from 1970s and 80s Pakistan required creating new cultural forms to forge counter-ideologies with global resonance. Creating such counter-ideologies through art was one of the few forms that visible protest could safely take place during the military dictatorship. As we are currently returning to a global conjuncture marked by authoritarianism, Left struggles have much to learn from Pakistani artists of the Zia period. Innovating new, politically engaged art forms that critique local and global political economy, educate people about social issues, and generate bonds of solidarity by showing the viewer that they are not alone in opposing authoritarian rule. For that reason, art as a tactic of social movements is beautifully dialectical in that in the very moment of repression, loneliness, and despair of everyday life under authoritarian rule, in reflecting the brutality of everyday life in an authoritarian state, art in that same instance, asserts overflowing life, creativity, and humanity. New artistic movements are therefore foundational for organizing any political movement against authoritarianism.
Kristin Plys is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto specializing in critical theory of the Global South. She is the author of Brewing Resistance (2020) and Capitalism and its Uncertain Future (2021, with Charles Lemert)